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Ugly Thoughts about Beauty

Time and time again I’ve said and written that my obsession with skincare is a way of micromanaging my whole exterior life. A blemish or a wrinkle is a flaw, and if someone catches one flaw they might just pull the whole thing apart. I’m deeply afraid of aging because that, too, skews the calculations. The world is more forgiving of young women, and my brain is already something that comes with disclaimers. The more placid a surface I can create, the harder it is to pin down my actual age, the less people will be tempted to look behind the curtain. My corrosive personality takes up so much space that I don’t have room to make physical mistakes.

I’m not a Pretty Girl, because from a very young age you either are or aren’t one, and I was not. Being a Pretty Girl is really just lines of input from your mom, your friends’ moms, your socialization as a girl, and your various privileges that you receive and compute to form the right output. In a vacuum it may not always translate to beauty, but it affords a sense of security. My mom, a great beauty who countless people have fallen in love with, is also not a Pretty Girl. And neither of us can spin those loves into confidence or assurance that we’re lovable. It all just bounces off.

Like countless people who have had to live any amount of time presenting as female, my relationship to my appearance is made up of my actual connection to my own body and my awareness of others’ connection to it. This is how I can begrudgingly acknowledge that enough people find me beautiful even though I hate myself and sometimes look in the mirror and think everything is angrily and badly put together. Knowing you have the ability to be beautiful but not being able to reap any personal benefits from it is a unique pressure that you can’t talk about because people find it obnoxious. Anyway, it’s there, and sometimes I wonder if people who were never told they were any of the superlative adjectives feel more free to let their partners see them with bad skin, to eat a big meal in public, to just get dressed and walk outside.

A writer I like explained once that she relies on language as a way of preceding and apologizing for her body and the space she takes up. It works the opposite way for me. I’m such an awful, vain motherfucker because I feel like my face is the only true apology, the only consolation prize, that I can wedge between the world and someone who has surely already worn our her welcome.